Quote collection
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"There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there are few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be."
"You have reached the end of cake"
"So let's not get frightened when the children read fantasy. It's the compost for a healthy mind. It stimulate s the inquisitive nodes, and there is some evidence that a rich internal fantasy life is as good and necessary for a child as healthy soil is for a plant, for much the same reasons."
"You're allowed to grant people into the darkness, but you must allow them to come out again."
"History, contrary to popular theories, is kings and dates and battles."
"In the end the problem isn't that you have the wrong sort of government for the People, but that you have the wrong sort of People."
"Shadwell hated all southerners and, by inference, was standing at the North Pole."
"Experience has taught me that you feel better on a flight if you avoid chicken fat in plastic sauce."
"People don't like change. But make the change fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another."
"I like the idea of democracy. You have to have someone everyone distrusts."
"The only thing more dangerous then a vampire crazed with blood lust was a vampire crazed with anything else. All the meticulous single-mindedness that went into finding young women who slept with their bedroom window open got channeled into some other interest, with merciless and painstaking efficiency."
"There's one thing you can say for air pollution, you get utterly amazing sunrises."
"I imagine that fish have no word for water."
"Never trust any complicated cocktail that remains perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in, and then immediately clouds."
"It seems that when you have cancer you are a brave battler against the disease, but when you have Alzheimer's you are an old fart. That's how people see you. It makes you feel quite alone."
"Words are the litmus paper of the mind."
"At some time in the recent past someone had decided to brighten the ancient corridors of the University by painting them, having some vague notion that Learning Should Be Fun. It hadn’t worked. It’s a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colors are chosen, institutional decor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow or surgical appliance pink. By some little-understood process of sympathetic resonance, corridors painted in those colors always smell slightly of boiled cabbage—even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the vicinity."
"It was Carrot who'd suggested to the Patrician that hardened criminals should be given the chance to 'serve the community' by redecorating the homes of the elderly, lending a new terror to old age and, given Ankh-Morpork's crime rate, leading to at least one old lady having her front room wallpapered so many times in six months that now she could only get in sideways."
"He found that he had this sudden desperate longing for the fuming, smoky streets of Ankh-Morpork, which was always at its best in the spring, when the gummy sheen on the turbid waters of the Ankh River had a special iridescence and the eaves were full of birdsong, or at least birds coughing rhythmically"
"There are thousands of good reasons why magic doesn't rule the world. They're called Witches and Wizards."